Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Data centers see business opportunities in offering an entire spectrum of services from virtualized basic hardware to turnkey task accomplishments. In particular, any task that scales better for the data center operator than it does for users renting virtual machines is a candidate for data centers to offer as a turnkey service. As an example, video transcoding is being offered by a data center operator as a turnkey service because it is difficult for users to run efficient video transcoding on arbitrary virtual machines.
String matching is another function by which data centers may scale better than individual users. Multipattern string matching is a general purpose function in which a processing module reports occurrences of a given set or dictionary string in a stream of data. Multipattern string matching arises in a number of applications including network intrusion detection, digital forensics, business analytics, and natural language processing. In one example, calculating the “reach” of a social media post involves recognizing and pulling all URLs out of a stream of data or detecting URLs that have various properties, and then processing the specific posts to extract unique subscriber counts and the like. Similarly, many consumer companies pay for access to feeds of various content posting streams in order to search for indications of feelings towards their products to either deal with discontent or promulgate positive crowd stories.
Realizing the value of multipattern search across multiple users has a number of challenges, however. To realize such advantages a data center will need to find and unify similar search streams, and then manage search and report ownership.